Hiro, who was anxious around everyone.
Hiro, who hid behind my legs when the mail carrier came or the wind rattled the windows.
Hiro, who had been in my care for eight months and still sometimes flinched when I moved too fast.
He went straight to Benji.
Not cautiously or with his usual tentative, trembling approach. He walked up to this stranger andsniffed his shoes with purpose. When said stranger crouched slowly and held out his hand, palm up, fingers relaxed, Hiro leaned his entire body into it, all three legs and fifty pounds. It was a full-weight, shuddering surrender of trust that I had spent months earning, and thispersonhad achieved it in approximately four seconds.
“Hey, buddy,” Benji said, and his voice was different again. It wasn’t the bright, performative register I’d heard in the hallway yesterday nor the pulled-back, trying-to-behave version standing in my doorway tonight. This was something else. It sounded softer and lower. It was the voice of a person who understood that a scared animal needed you to become very small and very still and very safe.
“You’re okay, little guy. You’re a good boy.”
Hiro’s tail wagged once.
It was his tentative, uncertain wag that always made my chest hurt because it meant he wanted to trust but wasn’t sure he was allowed to.
I stood in the kitchen doorway with a spatula in my hand and watched my most anxious, most guarded animal lean into the touch of a stranger, and I felt something I did not want to feel. It wasn’t attraction or warmth. Oh no, it was something more dangerous than both: the suspicion that I might’ve misjudged Benji.
I turned back to the stove before he could catch me looking.
“Dinner’s in twenty minutes,” I said. “If you’re hungry.”
“Thank you. Really. Thank you.”
I could hear that he meant it, which was inconvenient, because it’s easier to tolerate someone who is performing gratitude than someone who is genuinely feeling it.
“Don’t thank me yet,” I said. “You haven’t met the kittens.”
On cue, the bathroom erupted. General Tso’s tail lashed once, a single stroke of imperial displeasure. Princess Consuela, still in her carrier, hissed at everything she could not see on the grounds that it probably deserved it. Potato didn’t stir.
I turned the heat down on the chicken, pulled a second plate from the cabinet, and set it on the counter next to mine.
Two plates.
I hadn’t set out two plates in this kitchen since Portland.
Since David.
It didn’t mean anything. It was practical. The man needed to eat. I couldn’t let someone move into my home and then not feed them. That wasn’t how hospitality worked.
I turned away from the plate and tried not to think about it.
From the living room, I heard Benji murmuring to Hiro. He was still using that voice, the soft one.
I focused on the chicken, let the sizzle and the cumin and the familiar rhythm of cooking fill up the space in my head that was trying to become something complicated.
General Tso watched me from the refrigerator with an expression that said he didn’t believe my outwardly calm demeanor for a second.
Chapter 5
Benji
Iwoke up to a kitten on my face. By the taste of fur I was unable to spit from my lips, it wasn’t Princess Consuela. My princess was in her carrier on the floor beside the bed, where she had spent the night producing a low, vibrating hum of naked protest.
This was a different creature entirely.
It was small and fuzzy, with fur of bright orange and white, enormous blue eyes, and a purr that was wildly disproportionate to its body mass, as though someone had installed a diesel engine inside a tennis ball.
